Across the US, from cities to rural areas, it is imperative that anarchists and anti-authoritarians strive to build organizations to battle the emboldened far right, to advocate through militant action the needs of working-class communities, and to combat state repression.

What Needs to Be Done:
1. No to National “healing”, working with, or a grace period for the Trump Regime
2. Take to the streets – build a militant resistance
3. Build working-class defense organizations that resist racist attacks, sexual assault, immigration and homeland security raids and deportations, police brutality and state repression
4. Agitate and organize for workers actions – including a general strike against Trump
5. No to containment of the struggle back into the Democratic Party, electoralism and the Non-Profit Industrial Complex read full story / add a comment

Since the 45th Anniversary of the Attica prison riots – September 9th, 2016 – an estimated 24,000 people have been on strike in the USA. If you haven’t heard of the strike you are not alone. It has mostly been ignored by the mainstream media and even much of the Left. This is because the strikers are made up of a group who usually don’t feature in strikes: prison workers. read full story / add a comment

There is a new approach on the U.S. Left, which rejects both capitalism and state socialism. In several ways it resembles anarchism. It has been promoted by The Next System Project, and has been critiqued recently by Sam Gindin--who makes some insightful comments, but also demonstrates limitations. read full story / add a comment

In recent decades, there have been efforts to "rehabilitate" the U.S. Communist Party as an historical model for the Left. Anti-authoritarian socialists and anarchists find this troubling. Whle the CP did some good things it also did some very bad things. A brief summary of its history demonstrates that and explains why this is. read full story / add a comment

Commentary on a recent draft document on the strategy and vision of the Democratic Socialists of America, from the viewpoint of revolutionary libertarian socialism (anarchism). read full story / add a comment

A response to Crimethinc's statement, "Why We Don't Make Demands." Wayne argues that revolutionary anarchists should propose to movements which they are part of to raise militant, radical, demands. Done in dialogue with the people, it moves the struggle forward and challenges the state and the capitalist class. read full story / add a comment

We stand in solidarity with Cecily McMillan and will in the future. Cecily has been punished in order to make an example out of the Occupy movement. At the same time we must look at the bigger picture. By the end of today, another life, activist or not, will have been snuffed out by state violence. These include attacks against active militants involved in the struggle for liberation of oppressed peoples like Mumia Abu-Jamal, Maroon Shoatz and Leonard Peltier, as well as everyday people of color and undocumented migrants struggling to survive against the racist class divisions perpetuated by capitalism. There have been 239 people killed by the NYPD since Amadou Diallo in 1999, and 107 since Sean Bell in 2010; nearly all of them have been people of color. While we see that Cecily is a political prisoner, we recognize that the black and brown men and women who are systematically beaten on the street and thrown into prisons are political by default. Having historically been the most exploited of the exploited class, their well-being, survival and resistance to the widening gap between classes poses a threat to the capitalist status quo that the state seeks to insure. read full story / add a comment

Our intention with this call is to create a welcoming space where we can engage in an exchange of ideas with the broader public. We call on groups and individuals from all social anarchist and anti-authoritarian tendencies to join us to help plan and build this contingent. read full story / add a comment

Picket lines have returned to Insomnia Cookies, less than two weeks after the company settled with four workers who struck in August of 2013. On Friday March 14, two dozen union members and supporters rallied in front of the Boston location of Insomnia Cookies, demanding the reinstatement with back pay of union organizer and bicycle delivery “driver,” Tasia Edmonds. On March 9 the company suspended Edmonds without pay for a month, alleging insubordination, while the union maintains she was disciplined for her union-building efforts. read full story / add a comment

This essay is an argument for moving towards national organization in the United States. It explores the limitations of political organization today, recent positive experiences, and possible ways to build on the present to push forward. read full story / add a comment

This is a piece we’re sharing originally posted to Machete 408 by Adam Weaver. It is a review/summation piece is being released in conjunction with a forthcoming piece by Scott Nappolas which presents an extensive discussion of Lenin’s concept of democratic centralism. read full story / add a comment

The terrain is changing beneath our feet. Since the collapse of the majority of the “official communist” regimes, the world has witnessed both events and ideas that have undermined the former dominant thinking within the left. The Zapatistas, Argentina in 2001, South Korean workers movements, Oaxaca in 2006, the struggles around anti-globalization, and Greece’s series of insurrectionary moments have increasingly presented challenges to traditional left answers to movements and organization. In previous eras Marxist-Leninism was the nexus which all currents by default had to respond to either in agreement or critique. Today, increasingly anarchist practices and theory have come to play this role.

As a member of an anarchist political organization, a friend once told me I in fact was practicing democratic centralism. This was perplexing, because the group had no resembling structures, practices, or the associated behaviors of democratic centralism. However, I was told that since we debated, came to common decisions, and acted on that collective democracy, we were in fact democratic centralist. This kind of productive confusion led to questions about the concept, and why the target of democratic centralism has shifted. This move, the shifting conceptual territory of core concepts of a certain orthodoxy, comes up repeatedly not only with democratic centralism, but also surrounding ideas like crisis, dialectics, the State, and class. The resulting cognitive dissonance caused me to investigate attempts at reinvigorating the concept of democratic centralism (democratic centralist revisionism), and understand truly what it is, where it came from, and how it has been practiced. read full story / add a comment

Since the 45th Anniversary of the Attica prison riots – September 9th, 2016 – an estimated 24,000 people have been on strike in the USA. If you haven’t heard of the strike you are not alone. It has mostly been ignored by the mainstream media and even much of the Left. This is because the strikers are made up of a group who usually don’t feature in strikes: prison workers.

As much as this pains those who have participated in the anarchist communist experience between 2011 and 2014 in the Canadian prairies, today, Prairie Struggle announces its official secession and subsequent disbandment. To this day, Prairie Struggle was the only specific platformist organization in the Canadians prairies. Though some may recall the existence of an anarchist communist group in Regina affiliated to the ACF (Anarchist Communist Federation of North America) in the 80s, organized anarchism in the prairies has had many difficulties, some of which the Prairie Struggle Project has failed to overcome. Despite its downfall, Prairie Struggle, for one last time, offers a look into the organization, its failures and its small victories.

Once it became clear that Trump was going to become the president of the USA, my Facebook feed became cluttered with attempts to understand how that could possibly happen. How could a white supremacist, misogynist and utterly transparent snake oil salesman accumulate so many votes? Those on the left both inside and outside the borders of the USA struggled to understand what had happened.
[Listen to the audio of this entire article]
A common conclusion in too many of these pieces is that the left needs to reach out, and listen to the concerns of, those who voted for him as a priority. In a similar fashion to how sections of the left evaluated Brexit, they see a working class anti-establishment rebellion in the Trump vote from what they term the ‘white working class’. They believe that component was won by Trump because it has been neglected by the left - often, they will assert, because the rest of the left was distracted by what they call identity politics.
This is a simple explanatory story that is particularly attractive to those sections of the left that have a nostalgic yearning for an imagined past of pure class struggle, shorn of internal concerns around oppression. But the concept of masses of otherwise progressive working class voters opting for Trump on economic grounds is a myth. The attractiveness of that myth and its promotion has more to do with the hostility of that section of the left towards the influence of intersectional feminism than anything more substantive. That hostility has caused them to seek out anecdotes and exceptional regions and present them as the typical story that defines the election just as liberal Hillary Clinton campaigners have focused in on Facebook false news stories as the cause of her defeat.

Across the US, from cities to rural areas, it is imperative that anarchists and anti-authoritarians strive to build organizations to battle the emboldened far right, to advocate through militant action the needs of working-class communities, and to combat state repression.

What Needs to Be Done:
1. No to National “healing”, working with, or a grace period for the Trump Regime
2. Take to the streets – build a militant resistance
3. Build working-class defense organizations that resist racist attacks, sexual assault, immigration and homeland security raids and deportations, police brutality and state repression
4. Agitate and organize for workers actions – including a general strike against Trump
5. No to containment of the struggle back into the Democratic Party, electoralism and the Non-Profit Industrial Complex